What Color Is Your Parachute?

resume took.

To illustrate my point, I used to have a hobby of collecting “winning” resumes—that is, resumes that had actually gotten someone an interview and, ultimately, a job. Being playful by nature, I would show these without comment, to employer friends of mine, over lunch. Many of them didn’t like these winning resumes at all. “That resume will never get anyone a job,” they would say. Then I would reply, “Sorry, you’re wrong. It already has. I think what you mean is that it wouldn’t get them a job with you.”

The following resume is a good example of what I mean; it’s dated but it’s still my favorite:

Jim Dyer, who had been in the U.S. Marines for twenty years, wanted a job as a salesman for heavy construction and mining equipment, thousands of miles from where he was then living. He devised the resume you see, and had just fifteen copies made. He mailed them out, he said, “to a grand total of seven before I got the job in the place I wanted!”

Like the employer who hired him, I loved this resume. Yet some of the employers I showed it to (over lunch, as I said) criticized it for using a picture or for being too long, or for being too short, etc. In other words, had Jim sent that resume to them, they wouldn’t have invited him in for an interview.

Some employers will like your resume, some won’t. Trouble is, you don’t know which employer likes what. That’s why many job-hunters, if they use resumes, pray as they mail their resume: Please, dear God, let them be employers who like resumes in general, and may the form of my resume appeal to those employers I care about, in particular.

Whatever form you decide on, write it and then post it everywhere online: on the omnibus job boards, famous job boards, community bulletin boards, and niche sites. For lists of such sites, go to Quintessential Careers’ website at http://tinyurl.com/3nnqhse.

There are resume distribution services that can do this blanket posting for you, if you wish, often without a fee (see www.forwardyourresume.com for evaluations of such services).

Post your resume, above all, on the actual website of companies that interest you, if they have a site, and if their site permits that. (You have already chosen companies or organizations that interest you, I hope—whether or not they have any known vacancies.)

If you post your resume on the sites of particular employers, large or small, don’t count on any acknowledgment or reply. Just post the thing, cross your fingers, and pray it has come to the right place at the right time.

This strategy—planting your resume on the Internet midst all the other stuff that an employer will find if they Google you—will work better with small companies than with large, and with new small companies, especially.

But remember this: once your resume is posted on the Internet, there is really no way for you to ever take it down. Even if the site you initially post it on promises timely removal, you have no control over digital “spiders” that may come in stealthily, and copy it, often multiple times. One way or another, your resume may hang out there in cyberspace for the next one hundred years. So, make sure you’re pleased with it, before posting. And I mean very pleased!

Incidentally, if you’re blanketing the Internet with your resume, be cautious about including any stuff on the resume that would help someone locate you, particularly if you’re a female. No, I’m not being sexist. It’s just that there are some sick people out there. Sick in the head, that is. So, I’d leave out my address and home phone number if I were you. You can give that information to any employer who actually contacts you for an interview. But only then. For now, just give them some way to get in touch with you. Just your e-mail address is probably best.

TARGETING PARTICULAR EMPLOYERS

If you are planning on approaching particular employers, and not just posting your resume on job sites, then keep in mind that a resume is best not sent solely by e-mail these days. That route has been overused, and abused; in fact, many employers, leery of viruses, will not even open e-mail attachments (such as your resume). Of course, you can always get around that by copying and pasting your resume into the body of the e-mail. But then it will be unformatted, and neither it nor you will come across the way you want to. So send it by e-mail if you must, but always send a nicer version of it by the postal service, or UPS, or FedEx, etc.

If you’re going to mail a resume to a particular employer pay attention to the paper you write or print it on. Picture this scenario: an employer is going through a whole stack of resumes, and on average he or she is giving each resume about eight seconds of their time (true: we checked!). Then that resume goes either into a pile we might call “Forgeddit,” or a pile we might call “Bears further investigation.” And what is that employer’s first contact with your resume? It’s through the fingers. A resume on paper first presents itself to the employer’s sense of touch, before it presents itself to their eyes. By the message from their fingers they are either prejudiced in your favor before they even start reading, or prejudiced against you. Before their eyes read even one line. Usually they are not even aware of this.

So, you want the paper to feel good. That usually means using paper weighing at least 28 pounds (a paper’s weight is on every package). And you want it to “read good”—so be sure it’s nicely laid out or formatted, as they say, using a decent-size font, size 12 or even 14 (makes it faster to read), etc.

As for boiling down your resume so that it isn’t too long, what advice can I give you? Well, you ought to have some intention for that resume. I said previously that your intention might be just to collect and organize all pertinent information about yourself in one place, in contrast to your so-called Google resume, where the information about you may be scattered all over the lot.

But if you’re targeting particular employers, individually, then your resume can have only one intention and purpose: to get yourself invited in, for an interview. Nothing more.

This truth, however, is not widely understood. Most job-hunters (and even a few resume writers) assume a resume’s purpose is to “sell you,” or secure you a job. No, no, no. Its only purpose is to get you an interview. Believe me!

Selling is what you do after you’re in the interview room. It’s your task, when you’re face to face, not that piece of paper’s.

So, forget about selling yourself, for the moment; just read over every single sentence in your resume and evaluate it by this one standard: “Will this item help get me invited in? Or will this item seem too puzzling, or off-putting, or a red flag?” If you doubt a particular sentence will help you get invited in for an interview, then omit that sentence.

If there is something you feel you will ultimately need to explain, or expand upon, save that explanation for the interview, also.

Your resume is, above all, no place for “true confessions.” (“I kind of botched up, at the end, in that job; that’s why they let me go, as I’m sure they’ll tell you when you check my references.”) First of all, don’t give references until the end of the interview. And save true confessions also for the interview, near the end of the interview at that, and only if you’re confident at that point that they really want you. Ditto for discussing any nonobvious handicap you may have. Discuss what you can do—that you can perform the tasks required—not what you can’t do. Unless and until they have said they really want you.

DEPENDING ON RESUMES MAY BE INJURIOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

There are three dangers that arise from resumes. The dangers arise not from using them, but from